ISIS working hand-in-hand with Syrian government, says defector with list of ‘22,000’ foreign recruits

The New York Times reports: German authorities have obtained a list of the names of some 22,000 foreigners who have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State, a trove of documents that officials say will help them to prosecute fighters who return home, and improve their efforts to prevent other Germans from joining the organization.

The Interior Ministry confirmed on Thursday that officials believed the list was authentic, but they declined to give any details about where it came from or the identities of the people on the list. It was also not immediately clear whether the German authorities were sharing the list with intelligence agencies of their allies, including the United States and Britain.

The news of the list’s discovery was reported Monday by a team of investigative reporters from the Munich daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the public broadcasters NDR and WDR, but the story only received widespread attention when Sky News, a British broadcaster, said it too had obtained some of the documents. [Continue reading…]

Sky News reports: The files were passed to Sky News on a memory stick stolen from the head of Islamic State’s internal security police, an organisation described by insiders as the group’s SS.

He had been entrusted to protect the organisation’s core secrets and he rarely parted with the drive.

The man who stole it was a former Free Syrian Army convert to Islamic State who calls himself Abu Hamed.

Disillusioned with the Islamic State leadership, he says it has now been taken over by former soldiers from the Iraqi Baath party of Saddam Hussein.

He claims the Islamic rules he believed have totally collapsed inside the organisation, prompting him to quit.

I met him in a secret location in Turkey, and he said IS was giving up on its headquarters in Raqqa and moving into the central deserts of Syria and ultimately Iraq, the group’s birthplace.

He also claimed that in reality Islamic State, the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad, are working together against the moderate Syrian opposition. [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: Analysts on Thursday cast doubt on the authenticity of thousands of documents reportedly leaked from the Islamic State jihadist group, pointing out mistakes and uncharacteristic language.

The trove of documents, which includes the names, addresses, phone numbers and family contacts of IS jihadists, was handed over to Britain’s Sky News by a disillusioned former member, the broadcaster said Wednesday.

Syrian opposition news website Zaman al-Wasl said there were thousands of repetitions in the leaked documents and the names of only 1,700 people could be identified in the 22,000 documents.

The files include forms that IS recruits reportedly had to fill out in order to join the organisation and contain information on nationals from 51 countries.

There were several inconsistencies in the language of the forms that raised concerns, experts said. [Continue reading…]

Zaman Al Wasl reports: Zaman Al Wasl has exclusively obtained the personal data of 1736 ISIS fighters from over 40 countries, including their backgrounds, nationalities and hometown addresses.

The document that branded by ISIS as confidential is shedding the light on the inner circle of the de facto a state which has its own institutions and official documents as well data bank.

Two thirds of ISIS manpower are from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. 25% of ISIS fighters are Saudis, the data disclosed. [Continue reading…]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Facebooktwittermail